


A Good Son

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Armitage Hux Has Issues, Armitage Hux Needs A Hug, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, As Happy as the Starkiller gets, Brendol Hux death alternate take, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, But the theme is there, Cadet Armitage Hux, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Father/Son Incest, Gen, Horror, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Murder, None of these elements are kink they are all horror, Patricide, Rape/Non-con Elements, Revenge, Serial Killers, The incest does not actively happen, This dove is dead, You've never seen a deader dove
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:34:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26116543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: Hux did not know everything about his father, no more than Brendol knew everything about him. He was almost certain, for instance, that Brendol hadn’t picked up on his cigarra habit yet. Brendol abhorred smoking, and Hux did it out in the rain while he was home to dampen the smell. And Hux was one-hundred-percent certain that his father didn’t realize that Hux thought the new galactic physics professor was sort of cute, and was considering flirting with the man to see whether anything would come of it. There was no knowing everything. Even as he indulged in the occasional habit that would make Brendol see red should he figure it out, Hux did try to be a good son. Until the night in the office.//Hux stumbles into a discovery he'd have rather not made.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	A Good Son

**Author's Note:**

> Dead dove do not eat, detailed trigger warning is in bottom notes if you think you need it. General trigger warning for murder, violence, incest themes, and rape, including implied rape of minors. None of it is kink, it is for horror purposes. The shorthand is that Brendol is despicable. Please tread carefully if rape is a trigger for you. It is sort of cathartic for me to write out stories with rape elements sometimes as a rape survivor which is totally in the opposite direction of what some other people want/need! Here is the warning!
> 
> Welcome to a different take on the Hux and Brendol situation and Brendol's demise.

The one thing that no one, from another cadet to a professor to an officer of any caliber, would dare to ask Armitage Hux in casual conversation was: _How’s your father?_ They asked _how was your weekend_ and _how did you think that exam went_ and _what placement are you after_ , and the ones further from the front lines who still had softness around their edges even asked _how’s life treating you?_ But no one asked after Brendol.

He had been born Armitage Brendol Hux, _Armitage_ his mother’s choice and _Brendol_ in case his father didn’t manage to sire the trueborn son he wanted to bestow the name on, as if it were a prize, _Hux_ because his Arkanan mother had no last name to give him but the Empire’s forms required it. He was born and raised on Arkanis, with a brief detour off-world during the siege. He attended the Academy, like his father before him, although he might have been denied the privilege if Grand Admiral Rae Sloane had not bullied old Brendol into the idea. Hux -- for he developed an early preference toward his last name, as many cadets did -- excelled at the Academy. He had the top marks in his class and, if he finished out this last year in the same fashion, could have any post he wanted. Even the choice stations upon the largest of the burgeoning First Order’s star destroyers, the ones that Brendol would want for his son. And with time, with intelligent and dauntless service, he would command one of those ships, and he would never have to answer to his father again.

Autumn was coming on now, the gray of the skies and seas deepening to gunmetal, the green flora losing its verdancy. The planet would be gray altogether soon, and Hux’s last year at the Academy was halfway gone. The students were home for a two-week break, the ones that didn’t live full-time in the dorms, and Hux had elected to go home. It was unusual for him, though his home was scant miles from the Academy itself. He normally preferred to stay with his friends, which caused frequent arguments with Brendol. He did have friends -- he was perhaps more adept at making rivals, but to the cadets who fell in line beside him and accepted his judgements unquestioningly, Hux was a dear friend. Under the usual circumstances, Hux would stay in the dorms with Mitaka and Thanisson and they’d spend the break throwing on cheap clothes they picked up in Scarparus Port (black, so as to blend better in their trunks) and painting their faces to go out. They’d hit up different cantinas in the port and drink themselves sick -- Big Mike’s had live music, which Thanisson particularly liked, and The Tower had a cigarra stand inside the bar, which Hux appreciated.

This holiday, Hux broke from tradition because Brendol was not home. He’d been called away for a meeting of the old Empire minds, something vaguely important and secretive aboard the orbiter floating high above Arkanis’s atmosphere. It probably had to do with their personal collections -- most of Brendol Hux’s friends, and Brendol himself, were fond of digging up relics of the Empire’s past. Brendol had tried to share this with Hux once, in one of his better moods, laying out a board of pinned Empire medals once worn by the greats and walking Hux through them. Brendol had even smiled, revealing his small, even teeth. His father’s smiles didn’t make Hux shudder -- why should they when the maelstroms of his temper were so much worse? But when Brendol had offered Hux an opportunity to come along to scope out a junk-peddler’s wares for more forgotten medals that night, Hux had refused. He didn’t see much point in looking back to the past unless it was to improve upon the mistakes of old. Hux couldn’t care less what any of those old idiots were doing now, except that it meant he had the house to himself for the first week of break.

_How’s your father?_

He was good, and Hux was good too. A good son. At least he tried to be. Brendol married when Hux was six years old, shortly after Hux’s mother had ended her employment with them. Brendol had selected a pink woman with mousy brown hair named Maratelle. His first trueborn child was born a year later, and named Roisin. Her brother followed the year after her, this child finally given the coveted name Brendol Junior. There’d been a third, Shay, but she died young. Maratelle’s brood were ruddy and brunette with watery blue eyes, looking every bit like their mother. Maratelle had never been kind to Hux, perhaps exactly because she had to look at a bastard’s face every day and see -- at least in his hair color -- more of Brendol than she’d been able to recreate. Scarcely four years later Brendol and Maratelle were divorced and she’d installed herself in the upper crust of Scarparus Port. Brendol had sealed off most of the rooms in the manor, leaving his and Hux’s rooms, a shared bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, and his private office. It saved on heat. Roisin and Brendol Jr entered the Academy just as Hux had, their grades atrocious by comparison, and transferred out to Arkanan schools. The last dark mark of failure on Maratelle’s hide. Hux maintained a friendly if not brotherly relationship with his half-siblings. Brendol took up a post as the Academy’s commandant, too late to be of any assistance to his trueborn heirs in staying there, and made up for it by haunting Hux’s every step. Hux grew and matured, not casting off the thinness of his youth as he knew his father wanted, but growing into it. He had wiry strength now, a result of his cadet training. Brendol was not as quick to backhand him, and so Hux knew he had passed beyond some invisible milestone of manhood. And some more visible ones.

Living alone in the steel manor by the sea with his father, which had been the case since the divorce as the younger ones went with Maratelle, resulted in the occasional breach of privacy. Once, memorably, Brendol had entered the refresher while Hux was in, indulging in a bath to chase the Arkanan winter cold from his bones, and then had stood there an agonizingly long time after he realized the bath was occupied, staring down into the clear water where Hux had recently grown a shock of orange pubic hair. Hux had resisted scrambling to cover himself, freezing like he was under inspection. _Wasn’t I?_ And what felt like five whole minutes later but was likely only a few seconds, Brendol turned without a word and shut the door with a very final-sounding thud, a sound like the lid of a coffin sliding home.

And every so often when Brendol was in the drink, he’d come up behind Hux and hold him fast, a hand on Hux’s thin chest, Brendol’s sour breath hot on his neck and he’d say, “You’re my little boy, aren’t you? Tell me that you’ll always be my little boy.” And Hux would tell him, and it always tasted like acid. On Brendol’s forty-ninth birthday, as he approached the half-century mark, his three living descendants had thrown him a party on one of the Order’s ships, and there had been champagne (sweet, to Brendol’s preference) and music and many of his colleagues had gotten up to speak of his accomplishments. To Hux it sounded like the stuff of an obituary, which was still a long way off for Brendol, even with the changes his commandant years had brought upon his body and the resulting heart murmur. The milestones ignored the minutiae of Brendol’s life, and that was where Hux lived.

It wasn’t all sour, of course. When he was fifteen Hux had eaten something bad out with friends and when he came home and retched into the toilet with the door standing open, loud enough that it woke his father up across the hall, Brendol hadn’t yelled at him. He’d leaned against the sink counter beside Hux in his blue nightshirt, hanging off his paunchy stomach like an absurd reflection of a maternity dress, and petted Hux’s sweat-damp hair, pushing it back away from his face with plump fingers. Hux had vomited until there were tears rolling down his face, and then Brendol had coaxed him to lean back away from the bowl long enough for Brendol to flush the damned thing -- so that the smell wouldn’t make him sicker, Brendol said. He’d also called in to say that they would both be absent from classes the next day, and he’d canceled a trip he was taking off-planet in case this sickness was not a passing thing. Hux had repaid him months later by sitting for hours in the state-of-the-art medical bay of the orbital station as a mysterious lump in Brendol’s left armpit was biopsied and studied. It was determined to be no more than an infected lymph node, which was removed, and Hux piloted them both home where Brendol recovered quickly.

Hux could map out his father, even now, by the objects in the house. Brendol’s black raincoat was by the door, on the second hook as it always was. He took a different one on his trips -- a gray one with black lapels only rated for a chilly conference room aboard a star destroyer, more Empire style than Order. Brendol’s cologne sat on the counter in the bathroom, his toothbrush in the holder next to Hux’s. He might have used the same one for years if Hux didn’t meticulously replace both of theirs on schedule. Brendol was an ordered man in his professional life, but his own body bested him. He was weak for sweets, and there were candy bars in the fridge and frosty blue ice cream in the freezer that proved it. Brendol left the door to his office closed (a tacit banishment for Hux) and the door to his room open, and his slippers rested at the foot of his bed, one tucked in to the other. The medicinal scent of the shampoo he used sat heavy in the refresher, the kind meant to stave off dandruff and not much else. Those things and a thousand others comprised the secret history of Brendol Hux, known only to the two of them. Hux knew his father must have his own secret-history catalogue of him dating back twenty-one years come this spring, probably including the scent of his own shampoo, an unassuming citrus. Hux did not know everything about his father, no more than Brendol knew everything about him. He was almost certain, for instance, that Brendol hadn’t picked up on his cigarra habit yet. Brendol abhorred smoking, and Hux did it out in the rain while he was home to dampen the smell. And Hux was one-hundred-percent certain that his father didn’t realize that Hux thought the new galactic physics professor was sort of cute, and was considering flirting with the man to see whether anything would come of it. There was no knowing everything. Even as he indulged in the occasional habit that would make Brendol see red should he figure it out, Hux did try to be a good son. Until the night in the office.

The remote for the holovision in the living room rested on the arm of the right side of the couch, Brendol’s side. He was always in charge of programming when he was home, and Brendol always picked something antiquated like an old propaganda vid. But now Brendol was not home, and Hux was looking forward to indulging in a new holodoc about experimental TIE designs. Hux picked up the remote and brought it over to his side, flopping down bonelessly and clicking the device. Nothing. He clicked it again, frowning. The damned thing needed a new power cell. And the holovison was a new model, without manual buttons.

He could find none of the right type of cells in the kitchen, tearing the backs off various gadgets and holding the open remote next to them, reading the faint aurebesh characters on the glowing power cells within. So as a last resort -- the holodoc was on in 3 kriffing minutes, after all -- Hux opened the door to Brendol’s office. He’d left the windows cracked, and that was a strange thing to do with Arkanan weather, but Hux didn’t move to close them. Let his father drench his office if he wanted. Hux would pretend he hadn’t entered at all. He walked silently across the carpeted floor in his sock feet, and examined Brendol’s desk in the muted light of the windows. Brendol had taken both his comms unit and the larger desk communicator with him -- drat. There was nothing usable on the desk, and Hux hesitated to rifle through the drawers. One misstep and Brendol would know he’d been in here. This was not comparable to the toothbrush, this was the ordered domain of Brendol Hux the commandant. But maybe...yes! There was a long, low bench set into the wall opposite the desk, and in the far corner beneath the cushioned seat Hux could see the faint glow of a monoxide detector. He could check the power cell in that. He walked to the bench. Above it was a dimmed holo-screen with family photos on it, visible from Brendol’s desk at any moment should he choose to look. It contained a shot of young Roisin and Brendol Jr. in their cadet uniforms, standing close together. BJ was smiling a gap-toothed smile. Brendol had labeled it, the typed print glowing just below the image -- _The Home Team_ . Another photo was current, showing Roisin dressed up for a purely social First Order event that Hux had eschewed. She had a string of Arkanan pearls around her pink neck that Hux knew Brendol had purchased for Maratelle long ago. This one was labeled _Little Princess_ , and Hux snorted. There were no photos of him.

He leaned down and fumbled beneath the bench, counting on Brendol’s near-maniacal neatness of his work affairs to keep the underside of it neat, and banged his elbow on a box. Hissing in pain and annoyance, Hux pulled the container out. It was an Order-standard metal filing box. He scoffed to himself -- why not keep the damned thing where it belonged, stacked on the opposite wall with the other boxes? -- and he could have simply shoved it back under the bench. But he didn’t. Later he would realize and ponder that. He was in a hurry after all, so why hadn’t he? Perhaps only a feeling. Hux pressed the button on the front of it and it opened, little lights coming on around the top rim to illuminate the contents.

There was a real paper book, one of the ones the Academy kept like sacred tomes in its library. It was one of the titles Hux had borrowed out last year. He pulled it out, and then looked at the book below it, and pulled that one out. Three, four...six.... These were books he’d rented and then misplaced. And they were valuable, these paper books. He’d gotten a reprimand for it. And the librarian had looked so put-out when Hux explained he couldn’t find them, a librarian he’d been rather sweet on. Hux adjusted his perception of his father to include the fact that Brendol might be aware of his designs on the new physics teacher. He’d obviously recognized Hux’s partiality to the librarian, and had stolen these books away as punishment, or as prevention. He’d stolen them, the sneak, and hidden them here. Hux kept lifting books out, growing more exasperated with each one. He would find the whole set here, wouldn’t he?

And Brendol would regret lapsing in well-timed slaps and roaring fits of outrage, Hux thought, because right now Hux was so angry that when Brendol called -- as he did every night he was away -- Hux would just give him a piece of his mind. The first thing he was going to do was to take these books back to his own room, and it would probably require two damn trips because there were so many, and then Hux was going to switch out the power cell in the remote and watch the damn holodoc he wanted to, and when Brendol called he’d give him a fucking earful. Screw the beating he’d get for it. _Death from books, isn’t that a way to go_ \--

The thought broke off abruptly, clean as a manual power-down. Hux’s brain rebooted slowly. There was a zine below the last of his old library books, the kind printed on thin electrical foil so that the images could move. It was glossy and embossed and seemed expensive, and the flashing title screamed up in green neon: _Bondage Bitches!!_ With two exclamation marks, as if one wasn’t enough. Hux almost didn’t take it out, and wouldn’t have if he’d found it in Brendol’s desk or in one of his bathroom drawers. But there was something excruciating about finding it here, beneath his own things. _His_ books. The violation of that went beyond whatever embarrassment a man has about a sexual kink. Hux removed the zine from the box. The woman on the cover was a twi’lek, he thought, but couldn’t be sure. She was nude, and her face was covered by a black hood pulled tight to expose the contours of her screaming face. She squirmed, tied up with glowing red cords that bit into her breasts and belly. Rotating text next to her hip read _braindead bitch Blankuna asked for it and gets it on page 19!!_

Hux had no intention of turning to page 19. His Academy-approved sex education had been dry and forthright, but had touched on the existence of fetish holonet sites and clubs, painting the latter as much more dangerous than the former. Don’t be embarrassed, the contracted teacher had assured the class, young people are adventurous by nature, and investigation of sexual behavior termed ‘alternative’ by the Order (gay sex was number one in that regard, which was no small source of amusement for Hux, who’d only ever known attraction to men. Group sex was number two, also not unknown to cadets in his age group) was completely natural, if not encouraged.

So: investigation. That was all this was, this particular zine falling into the same class of content as fetish holonet sites. Of course, this was worlds more expensive. But Brendol had the means. Hux turned the thing over and was greeted with another scene, a human woman strapped to a steel table. A man stood over her brandishing an Order-regulation knife at her thigh, but the man was stocky and aged, and his leather garments were ill-fitting. He looked more like...well, more like Brendol than like a currently-deployed officer. He certainly didn’t look fit to carve up the bondage bitch du jour. There was no pricing on either cover, but Brendol had probably purchased it through the holonet. Hux couldn’t picture his father wandering stiff-necked through any sort of establishment that would sell something like this.

There were more of them in the box, the glow of the next cover down lighting the inside of the container up -- the title was yellow this time, and the still-female model splashed with fake blood. Hux thought it was fake, anyway. He looked closer -- yes, definitely syrup. He put the zine in his hands back into the box, and then, biting his lip, replaced his books as well. It was too late to make amends with the librarian anyway, and Hux didn’t want to talk to Brendol about the box anymore. If he did, Brendol would be embarrassed and defensive. He’d probably call Hux sexually naive, which was not an insult that Hux could argue without getting himself into deeper trouble. _You’re my little boy, aren’t you?_

Hux closed the box. He thought silently that he’d built his relationship with his father into a second house of sorts, a mirror-house, only they’d never sealed the extra rooms off in it. After twenty years it was rambling, and there were dark crannies and strange spaces, dusty and abandoned, and some contained unpleasant things it was better not to find. _Tell me that you’ll always be my little boy._

“Shut up,” Hux said aloud to his own traitorous brain, and then shoved the box back under the bench to make his point. It slid all the way to the rear wall, and there was a deep and resounding _clunk_ . What was that? It had sounded hollow. _I don’t want to know_ , thought Hux. He stood and walked out, closing the door behind him, the power cell (and the dead remote on the floor) forgotten. As he re-entered the living room, his communicator rang.

Hux waited, bringing it along with him to the kitchen, too lazy to read the incoming address. The message center would kick in soon, and if it was Brendol he simply wouldn’t answer. He didn’t want to speak to his father right now. Brendol might hear something in his voice. Hux could blame the missed call on being engrossed in the holodoc he was missing, and call back later. By then he could stave off the nausea of his discovery and speak normally. But it wasn’t Brendol, it was Mitaka. “Shit,” his voice said from Hux’s communicator. “Pick up, dumbass.”

“Hello handsome,” Hux said, pressing the button to accept the call. “You can head over now, my dad’s not home.” He made his voice artificially sugary, which he knew would make Mitaka laugh. It did. Mitaka was bubbling over with news; there’d been a fight in the dorms after Hux left. He relayed it in gory detail to Hux’s delight.

“So how are things over there?” Mitaka asked.

“Quiet,” Hux said. _Sort of_.

“Keeping busy?”

 _Father certainly is. He’s developing new interests. Or indulging old ones_. “Oh, you know me.”

“I saw Roisin in Scarparus last night.” Mitaka said her name _Ro_ -sheen, the emphasis in the wrong place.

“Oh? And you didn’t buy her a drink?” Speaking of, Hux opened the conservator. There was a bottle of sweet liqueur chilling there, Brendol’s addition, and a bottle of dry white wine, Hux’s. He selected it and then reached up into the cabinet for a glass, pouring himself a generous serving.

“What, and marry into that fucking nuthouse you call a family?” Hux laughed obligingly at the quip, and Mitaka continued. “No, man. I’m not asking out your sister.”

“She’s not exactly--”

“It’s still weird. Besides, then you’d be honor-bound to kick my ass or whatever.”

“Not if you were polite,” Hux said, smiling as he anticipated Mitaka’s response.

“I’m very polite!” Mitaka insisted, his voice pitching up in mock outrage. Then, “I gotta run, I’m taking Thanisson out again. He didn’t get his fill.”

“Never does,” said Hux, biting back the urge to tell Mitaka not to let Thanisson drink too much. He wasn’t their kriffing mom. “Talk to you later.” His smile was fading even before the connection went dead.

There had been a _clunk_ . Not the sound the wall should have made when the box rammed into it. _I don’t care_ , thought Hux, which was untrue, and he took a deep and bracing swig of wine from his glass. The clunk felt like unfinished business. Hux had almost convinced himself to ignore it when he remembered the remote -- he’d have to go back for it anyway, he’d stupidly left it in Brendol’s office, a sure sign of his trespass. He took his comms unit with him this time, for the built-in flashlight. Groaning and tying his pleated robe tighter around himself over his sleep clothes -- it was getting cold in that room with the windows open -- Hux returned to the office.

With the aid of the flashlight, Hux could clearly see two lines of darkness interrupting the plastisteel baseboard where he’d just hauled the box out from again, one slightly fatter than the other. For a moment his brain fought to make sense of it. Then disquiet formed in his stomach like a ball of ice. It was a hiding place, a panel in the wall that Hux had knocked loose pushing the box into it.

 _Right. You’re going to set it back into place, and put the box back, and then you’re taking the remote this time and leaving. Whatever it is, it’s Father’s business, and you don’t want to know._ Hux told himself. It was good advice, but he didn’t take it. He crawled under the bench completely with his comms unit, noting the lack of cobwebs. _There isn’t any dust because he crawls under here too. He’d have to -- the bench is too wide for either of us to reach the wall except from underneath it._ Was that true? He hadn’t tested it. But Hux thought so, oh, he thought so. The false panel in the baseboard was ajar, but it was plastic, and so it didn’t explain the clunk. Hux pulled it away, revealing a hidey-hole two feet across, a foot high, and so deep it swallowed the light of his comms unit.

He reached in and grasped something at the edge of his vision, pulling it forward. When his hand closed on the corner of it he felt a sense of dread so thick it was practically solid and real, weighing his body down. There was no dust inside this space to disrupt either. Brendol got into here often. In a way that was a relief. He’d split Hux’s back open with a cane for doing this if he found out. That hadn’t happened in a good few years, and Hux had no intention of bringing it on himself again. He pulled the object out. It was a wooden box, real wood. The one Hux had purchased for Brendol four birthdays ago, designed for medal displays. Hux had intended it for Brendol’s own worn medals, and the gift had actually made his father exclaim in delight: a victory. Hux knew he’d seen the box in years past sitting on Brendol’s dresser through his open bedroom door, but he hadn’t seen it lately, now that he thought of it. Hux just bet that if he opened it now he would not find his father’s old Empire medals. _Don’t look, then_ . But he’d gone too far now. He opened the box, thinking, _let it be empty_. It was not.

There were little bundles stacked inside on top of the velvet lining, each one bound with a little silver clip. They were plainly Order and Empire documentation, ID cards or what-have-you, but as Hux removed the first of the bundles and shifted onto his side to shine his flashlight onto it, it was not Brendol’s face that greeted him. This card belonged to Petra, the Arkanan maid that had left their service three months ago to go back to her family. Hux remembered her face, though he’d hardly been home in the past year and so hadn’t seen much of her. Her eyes stared up at him from the First Order ID picture, two chips of pale green just like his own and like his mother’s. Native Arkanan eyes. Hux moved the ID card to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next one. This was Petra’s referral, which didn’t make any sense. Suppose she wanted to work for an Order family again after she dealt with whatever emergency had called her away? She needed these. He looked at the next card, the last in the bundle. It was her Arkanan ID, complete with tribe and blood type. She’d have needed it at the train station.

The room was no longer silent, and Hux realized that the noise was him. He was making a desolate sound in the back of his throat, a precursor to weeping. He paid little attention to the local news, as busy as he was with school, and Petra’s ties to the Order had been neatly trimmed up and clipped free. But if he looked her up on the holonet, would he find articles from three months ago? Desperate pleas for information from a worried family? Hux clipped these cards back together in the right order: FO-ID, referral, Arkanan ID, and then moved on to the next bundle.

This one was a story he’d heard. The sight of the little face on the card made his throat feel tight. It was a cadet in his own class, gone missing the year before and turned up dead. Murdered. Savaged. Riley Drayson, who had been half-Arkanan just like him, with pale eyes. He’d heard of nothing else that whole academic year, even after the body was found, and there were still student-organized vigils every so often. He’d gone to them. Feeling sicker by the moment, Hux picked up the next stack of cards. A young gardener, dismissed two years ago. Hux hadn’t thought of the boy since then, but he thought now. Stars above, he wished he weren’t thinking. The next set belonged to a mechanic who had worked on their speeders four or five years earlier, whenever Brendol had bought the one with a faulty repulsor. She’d been pleasant, entertaining more of Hux’s questions than she needed to as she worked. It must have been five years, because he’d asked her about what he was learning for his repulsorlift technology project. Hux skipped to the end of the line, picking up the last bundle of cards at the opposite end of the box he’d started on.

His heart had abandoned his chest to make room for that growing ball of ice that now extended from the pit of his stomach to his sternum. His heart was in his throat, making it difficult to swallow. He did so with effort, his next breath a sobbing gasp. With trembling fingers he turned the stack of cards over.

 _I want to die_ , was his first thought, and it wasn’t quite true, but it was as close to the truth as words could get. Hux did weep then, looking at the image of his mother’s face printed on her First Order ID issued over twenty years ago. He flipped through this stack, his flashlight bouncing erratically as he shivered. FO-ID, referral, her stars-damned referral that Brendol had typed out. Hux read it, disgust turning his stomach over when he saw that Brendol noted she was a frequent complainer. Not that it mattered. Not that she had ever taken this card to a new employer looking for work. The referral’s very creation had been a show, just a box to tick off for the Order. Then her Arkanan ID, the one she’d have needed to board a train back to the lands of the tribe listed, if that’s where she had wanted to go at all. _If she even wanted to leave_. All his life Hux had operated under the merciless fact of his mother’s departure, the knowledge that she’d been enticed somewhere else by the promise of better pay or a nicer kitchen to work in, and that he hadn’t been reason enough to stay. He’d tried not to take it personally and over the years he began to approach acceptance. But had she decided to go? Or had Brendol invented all of it? Either way, Hux was very sure that she hadn’t deserved whatever end she got. If it was anything like Riley Drayson’s.

Hux pulled stacks of cards from the box with shaking hands, turning them over and shining his flashlight on them, gasping out another harsh sob at all the little green eyes staring back at him. He had to click the light out and lay in darkness to try and calm himself, pulling his robe up over his nose and mouth and breathing in recycled air. His entire frame shook with acute misery. As he stilled, the darkness became worse even than seeing all those faces. There was a chill coming out of the hidden space as though he were back standing in front of the conservator, and Hux was suddenly sure that something even worse was back there, some nameless and formless thing watching him. He clicked the light back on and looked at the mess he’d made of Brendol’s trophies. The little card-bundles were scattered and out of order.

Hux put them back in the box with hands that had no feeling -- who had been first? The gardener? No, Petra. Petra was first, then poor Riley. After that he muddled through the dates. His mother was last. _First, technically_ , he thought, and then had to stifle another bout of tears. He put the little card-bundles back in face-down just as they had been, praying that he got the order right. There was no dust, after all, and no cobwebs. How often did Brendol lay exactly like this, looking at these tokens? No wonder he had a bad back. Hux shut the wooden box, the one meant for old war medals. Just then his comms unit rang, held directly next to his face, still being used as a flashlight. The sound was deafening, and he shrieked. It was him this time, it was Brendol, and if Hux answered he’d hear his father’s voice. Probably cheery from time with the old lads, Brendol’s voice asking _Hey honey, how are you?_ Brendol was a man of easy endearments, particularly when he wanted something or when he was in a cheery mood, and Hux had always hated it. It was the sort of thing people called each other on overplayed holo-dramas. He thought if he heard it right now he would gag.

The comms unit rang and rang, and then cut off. Brendol would leave a message, as he always did when Hux missed a call. Brendol didn’t like to be ignored. _What the hell are you up to? Give me a call back, honey. You know how I worry. The number is…_ and Brendol would list his number as if Hux didn’t have it saved, and he’d probably list the number of the room on the orbiter he was staying in too. He took nothing for granted.

Infinite cruelty spun apart and back together in Hux’s head, the kind of thing that absolutely couldn’t be true, the monster delusions that rose up from the mud at the bottom of his brain at 04:00 hours if he wasn’t yet asleep; that the headache he’d had all day was a brain tumor, or that Mitaka hadn’t returned to his bunk yet because he’d been run over by an errant speeder-bike and was laying comatose in the medical ward. But this wasn’t 04:00 hours, it was barely 8:00 and he wasn’t tired. Hux replaced the box and the panel in the wall, then slid out from beneath the bench and carefully put the metal filing box back, not pushing it carelessly this time. If he heard that hollow clunk again he’d scream, and if he started to scream maybe he wouldn’t stop. He stood, no longer feeling the chill of the room because the inside-chill was greater. He was glued in place by the weight of the terrible secret he’d stumbled into and then pursued until it was laid out in all its horror. He was vaguely aware he needed the toilet, and the mundanity of that shocked him into moving. He did not forget the remote this time.

It had been beyond stupid, not paying closer attention to the cards. Hux just knew he’d gotten the filing wrong, and that would be his undoing. How much worse than a caning would this be? Within him coiled deep was the ultimate question; if Brendol had killed before, killed outside of war and outside of necessity, killed for the sport of it or the love of it or the fucked-up unstable need of it or _whatever_ , would he kill Hux? That collection had been vast, mostly unknowns but also, _also the cadet last year_ . Brendol had likely decided the risk wasn’t worth it after the fanfare that one got. To keep all of this a secret, he’d been careful for a long time. Hells, Brendol _was_ careful. He was neat with his work. Hux never should have opened the wall. Or the box. Either box. He shut the office door behind him and moved woodenly toward the bathroom. _Stupid bitch_ , he thought at himself. He said aloud, “A stupid bitch but not a bondage bitch.” And then laughed without mirth. All he’d wanted was a fresh power cell for the stars-fucking-damned remote.

Hux pissed with the door open, watching the thin yellow stream hit the bowl where years before he’d spilled his guts and his father had stood beside him, gracelessly petting his hair. When he was done, he decided to make tea. Tea was calming. He was filling the kettle in the sink, thinking with growing panic that the kitchen had been the wrong choice because his mother had worked in the kitchen and what if she’d worked here until her dying day and what if she’d _died here_ \-- when his comms unit rang again. He dropped the kettle in the sink and the loud metallic _bang_ sound made him jump. He wiped his wet hands on his robe and thought, _Okay. Okay. If he can keep a secret, so can I. Be calm_.

He answered the call.

“Hey honey, how are you? You busy?” His father’s voice; Imperial accent, slight slur. He’d been drinking with dinner, drinking with old friends. _Honey_ , which meant he was in a good mood despite the missed call. Insults flowed as freely as pet names from Brendol Hux’s mouth, should his temper flare.

“Oh, yeah I...uh, I was watching a holodoc. Sorry, Father.” Hux said. There was a long silence. It felt long, though surely it was only a few seconds, and Hux heard the whine of the conservator and the drip of the spilling kettle in the bottom of the sink. The beating of his heart.

“You sound thick in the voice. Is everything okay?” Brendol asked, picking up on any difference immediately as he always did. His voice dripped with his characteristic concern masking suspicion and irritation, which had never been more terrifying than now.

“I was thinking about Shay,” Hux heard himself say, and it was not only a lie, it was the wrong thing to say. He shouldn’t talk about death right now.

“Oh, baby,” said Brendol, and there was genuine empathy in his voice now. Why not? Shay had been his child. Hux had found her after the accident and brought her home to Brendol’s arms, and Brendol had cried like Hux had never seen him cry before or since. Hux thought that perhaps the only thing that could affect his father more deeply was the untimely end of Brendol Junior. Perhaps that was unfair to think. Did Hux need to care about that anymore? Was there any measure of unfairness toward Brendol that was inexcusable? Brendol had been talking, and Hux hadn’t listened.

“Sorry, what was that? I’m making tea.” Another lie, but a small and plausible one.

“What got that going?” Brendol asked, sounding only mildly annoyed at having to repeat himself.

“Oh, uh...Mitaka called and said he saw Roisin out on the town. Got me thinking. I went for a walk and it’s sort of cold out, so I’ve been sniffling. You heard it, huh?”

“Right away, my boy.” Brendol’s voice issued gratingly from the comms unit speakers, and Hux fought not to wince at it. Then, worse: “Why don’t I cut my trip short? I could come home tomorrow.”

Hux almost cried out a desperate _No!_ But there wasn’t a worse thing to do. Brendol would be on a shuttle home in the next two minutes if he sensed something was wrong. “I’m not quite so fragile, Father,” Hux said, and his voice didn’t shake.

“I don’t like hearing you sound so low,” said Brendol, and it was more a threat than anything. Meaning, shape up.

“I was,” said Hux. “I’m not now.” Please let that be the final lie. “She was my sister, and I brought her home. Sometimes I think about it, that’s all.” Shay had fallen into one of the pitted cliff-side pools beyond the treeline and drowned before anyone went looking. Hux found her and hauled her out after he was tasked with calling his half-siblings in for dinner. He had carried her a mile back through the woods, water draining down his body from her clothes, her brown hair gone black and stringy over her face and all the pink gone from her skin. The first thing he’d heard upon returning to the house was Maratelle’s high-pitched shriek -- _What have you done?!_ He hadn’t gotten a word out before she was on him, scratching at his arm with her nails to hold him steady while her other hand splayed over Shay’s cold face. Then Maratelle had crumpled to the ground, and Brendol was next. Hux handed Shay over to him. He couldn’t remember what he’d said to his father that evening. It was a blur. Probably he’d tried to explain himself, to defend himself against Maratelle’s initial cry. “Stay there,” Hux said. “If you come home I’ll feel like a kid.”

“You’re my little boy,” said Brendol, and Hux’s flesh crawled.

“Yes, Father,” he said.

“I’ll call you at 7:30 tomorrow.”

“Yes, Father.” Hux said, and then laughed, and it was a real one. Brendol always called in the evening when he was away, and he always specified when the time would be different. Brendol chuckled along with him, and they said their goodbyes, and then Hux ended the call and he was alone again in the kitchen. He still loved Brendol. He wished he didn’t. Oh, it was different from the way most sons loved their fathers. Hux loved Brendol in the way that a revolutionary loves his country. He loved the _idea_ of him. The reality would never measure up. And tonight the reality of Brendol became even darker than Hux had previously thought.

  
  


Hux reclined in bed, holding his datapad up and connecting to the holonet. A storm was brewing outside, great gusts of rain hitting the windows, and the connection was frustratingly slow. Once the basic entry screen was loaded and he’d filtered it to only display local results, he searched first for Petra. Native Arkanans eschewed family names, preferring to think of themselves as a huge interconnected family across the planet, and Hux was prepared for the search to be an arduous one. But, timing was on his side. She’d been walking through this very house, alive and well, only three months ago. He clicked through only two pages of links before he found the one he wanted. The photo that greeted him when he opened the article felt like a slap; it was Petra mostly as he remembered her, but out of uniform and smiling wide, her arm looped around another woman. The text below revealed it was her girlfriend. Hux wondered if the girlfriend had provided this photo for the news. Probably she had. Probably she still had a copy glowing faintly on some display board or another in her own house, unless it was too painful. The headline read SCARPARUS PORT WOMAN MAY HAVE BEEN SERIAL KILLER’S 11TH VICTIM. Hux shook his head numbly. There had been so many more than eleven.

Petra had been found in a flooded ravine -- there had been a long bout of thunderstorms, Hux remembered, when she quit her post. If she quit her post -- six miles outside Scarparus. Arkanan police determined that the death likely occurred via strangulation. The article also divulged that Petra had been tied up -- the ligatures removed after death, though their marks remained -- beaten with a cane, bitten until she bled, and raped before she died “in a manner consistent with the other killings.” The end of the article contained links to the coverage of the other killings by the same news source, little underlined names that Hux recognized. He clicked through them, reading the dates. The most recent ones happened much closer together than the older ones. There had even once been a gap of 16 years, just after his mother left. Here she was, reported missing all those years ago. He didn’t click the link. There was no article, at least here, reporting her body found. She hadn’t been the first, Hux saw; there were two others that turned up in the years before she’d begun her employment under Brendol. One of them, sickeningly, was a little boy also from Scarparus. In that 16-year gap this journalist had theorized that one of three things happened: the killer moved to another region and continued his hobby there, he had been arrested for an unrelated crime, or had killed himself. The only theory not presented was that he had simply stopped. Men like this killer, the journalist insisted, did not tire of murder. “It’s their compulsion, their secret life,” the article said.

Secret life. What poison that phrase was. Hux wrestled with his revulsion at what he’d discovered tonight. He had already known his father was no stranger to murder. Brendol had begun his military service during the Clone Wars. He’d been killing for a long time, and not all of it within the ‘rules’ of war. Hux had blood on his hands too. He had no qualms about it; the fellow cadet who’d taken a tumble down the cliffs at Area Null had been asking for it. _Like braindead bitch Blankuna?_ Another thought, this one worse: _like Petra? Like Mum?_ Hux took in a long, slow breath and released it. If cruelty was hereditary, he was predisposed, he admitted to himself. Was it hypocritical of him to judge his father in this?

The fourth victim, the one who had proved the journalist wrong in their third theory (and Hux knew the other two ideas didn’t hold up either, Brendol had not been arrested, and their flight from Arkanis to avoid the siege only accounted for a year of the gap between murders), had been a woman from Brasov across the eastern sea. She was fished from an overflowing well in the backyard of an octogenarian with bad eyesight and almost total hearing loss, too poor for bionic implants, who was of course unable to pinpoint whether they had noticed anything strange in the days before. One of the woman’s nipples had been bitten clean off. There was another hiatus, a shorter one.

The fifth victim, the first in what the reporter called “the new cycle” because the killings began to ramp up in frequency, had been found in the cellar of his own home by his husband, returned from a business trip. The man had been beheaded, the head stuffed upright into the shelving on the wall so that it would be looking at whoever next came down the stairs. Or perhaps watching the killer leave. His body lay in the center of the floor, ass-up so that the bite marks in a dozen places on his buttocks and thighs were immediately visible. He’d been caned, just like the others, and sodomized with an object. The cane, it was theorized.

Hux flipped through the other articles, taking in the details. The trail skipped from the gardener (the killer’s ‘ninth’) straight to Petra, no record of the murdered cadet. And why should there be? That was an internal affair. It was not surprising that Brendol had operated so long and not been caught. The First Order and the Arkanan authorities were insulated from each other. So were their communities. Was Hux blind not to have seen these stories before? No more than his peers, he thought, because no one was talking about these cases at the Academy. Petra was listed as the eleventh, and Hux clicked back to the gardener’s article to validate the discrepancy and then away again, blanching. The gardener’s daughter had evidently stumbled onto the scene where the killer was working, and so he’d disposed of her too. She was the tenth. She had lived a shorter life than Shay.

There were more articles, more he could read if he chose. It would not dispel the nightmare, and so Hux clicked his datapad off and stared at the ceiling. He felt like a terrible coward, as though reading every word of his father’s misdoings was the price he should pay for walking these halls with him so long and blissfully not knowing. _Was_ it hypocritical of him to judge his father in this? _No_ , he decided with a shudder. The gardener’s daughter had been found stripped and beaten, with the same characteristic bite marks. Her youth had not saved her an ounce of suffering. No matter how many little similarities existed between Hux and his father as a result of blood or cohabitation, Hux would never be that. The rebels might see no difference between a well-aimed blaster shot and a crime like Brendol’s, but Hux did. Brendol had killed his cadet victim for the love of it, Hux suspected. Hux had done away with his because the other boy was in his way, trying to pull him down into petty squabbles and distract him. It had been an errand, not a treat. And he hadn’t hurt him any more than necessary. An instant of free fall and a broken neck, and then that other cadet had known no more. It was better. It was...cleaner. Was that a self-serving lie? Hux’s head swam.

He was aware that he was going to vomit very soon, and raced to the bathroom, leaning over the bowl, and if pissing here had brought back the old memories this was a thousand times worse. He could almost feel thick fingers running through his hair as he ejected bile into the toilet. He thought he was done, gasped raggedly, and then thought of Riley Drayson’s skinny body with his bruised and strangled face pushed into the bushes just beyond the Academy walls, and dried blood the color of rust covering his backside, torn free by the abuse he had suffered. That tipped him over and he vomited again, this round straight acid. There was nothing else to heave up. Cold sweat dripped down his body under his clothes.

Hux closed the toilet lid and flushed it, laying his head on the white plastic as the plumbing roared below. _What am I going to do?_

He could call the Order’s top brass or the Arkanan police, or both, but for what? Was there enough evidence to put Brendol away? _There is and you know it_. But would the Order allow Brendol to be put away? Surely there would be some form of consequence. Butchering locals was one thing. Amid the atrocities of war, it was easy for Hux to imagine that might be swept aside in favor of keeping a useful commandant in place. But the torture-murder of a cadet? That was more complicated. And suppose Brendol Hux did go down in flames, it wouldn’t only affect him. Hux’s name (the only name he liked) would be tarnished as well. And Roisin and Brendol Junior would be devastated. BJ, especially, idolized their father. Hux dismissed that; in truth it didn’t matter to him. He was grasping for reasons to turn the other way. Hux dragged himself up and pressed the button on the side of the toilet to activate it’s cleaning cycle, washing away any splatter of bile he might have left there. His ribs were sore. He might have puked hard enough to pull a muscle.

One man’s psychopathic tendencies would not matter as much to the First Order as the fate of the war did, the fate of the galaxy. And it shouldn’t, Hux reasoned. Of course it shouldn’t. The Order came first. Perhaps Brendol could be replaced with someone better, he mused on his way back to his bed. Then there would be no harm no foul in laying his father’s crimes out to dry. Metaphorically of course, they’d never actually dry in the Arkanan rain. Hux giggled at that, and then thought somberly, _I’m out of my mind_ . The notion of suicide occurred to him, and seemed just as rational as any of the rest of it. He could leave a note confessing his own crime. It would make him look a bit silly; career-oriented murder wasn’t something anyone would truly begrudge him unless they themselves were too soft for the Order. There was something else, too, that nagged him. Hux wasn’t sure he believed in a conscious life after death. The old Jedi tales of ghosts had always sounded rather fanciful to him, but suppose there was? What if he put his blaster to his head and pulled the trigger, and then was confronted by a ghastly receiving line of strangled men and women (and children, his brain helpfully supplied, don’t forget the children and don’t forget _Riley_ ), and what if at the end of his line was his mother, holding hands with the boy Hux had pushed from the cliffside? And if his father’s victims then accused him of ignoring what he had found, that would be true. He thought again, _I wish I was dead_. But he wasn’t.

Hux was meticulous in keeping his calendar, and he often noted when Brendol would be absent from their home or unreachable for the night, hard at work in his Academy office. Brendol supplied that information willingly, just as meticulous with the workings of the Order as his son was. Hux looked back on his calendar now, checking dates. Not trying to find a conflict that would absolve his father; he knew one didn’t exist. Just being thorough. Reliably, Brendol Hux had been late coming home or stayed the night in his Academy office in the time frame that each of the recent murders had been committed, shortly before the discovery of each of the bodies. When Hux tapped at the date that Riley’s murder had likely occurred on, a chilling memory came to him. He’d argued with Brendol that evening, before Brendol had returned to his office. Hux had planned to go on a camping trip with Mitaka that weekend and his father wanted him to stay home. They’d screamed at each other about it before Brendol threatened to tie him up and leave him outside in the rain to teach him respect, and Hux had capitulated. Then Brendol stormed off, back to work. Work was always his answer, just as it was Hux’s. But maybe not. If Hux was correct in his deductions, Brendol had not stayed in his office at the Academy that night. He’d gone to the dorms and woken Riley Drayson. Any demand from the commandant would be met without question. Suppose Brendol woke the boy up, a boy Hux’s age and build with the same Arkanan eyes, and asked him to dress and accompany him beyond the gates on watch. Unusual, but a good cadet would jump to it. Hux wondered if Brendol had muttered anything about teaching the boy respect out into those silent woods. If Riley had been alive to hear it, or already gone. If Hux weren’t spent, he might be sick again.

Hux scrolled back through his calendar to the night the gardener died. Brendol had gone out again, out to have a pint he’d said. Because they had argued. Hux scrolled forward, to Petra’s dismissal. He hadn’t been home for that one and had only learned later that the maid had moved on, but that day… he tapped the week, bringing up his appointments. There’d been a dorm party the night before, the kind with raunchy games, and Thanisson had been tasked with kissing Hux’s neck on a dare. He’d been rather exuberant, and left a faint bruise that Hux forgot about. The next morning Hux had woken to a hologram call from his father, as if Brendol could smell guilt on him, and Brendol had seen the mark. He’d roared about integrity and decency as if he weren’t speaking directly to the living result of his own indiscretions. And later that day, Petra had been dismissed from both work and, evidently, life itself. As Brendol liked to say, if you found enough cat hairs on a cadet’s uniform, there was bound to be a feline somewhere. Brendol was not fond of felines.

Hux laid down on his bed again without showering, though he stank from sweating. He ordered the lights off, saw Riley Drayson’s face leering at him judgmentally in the dark, whispering _it should have been you_ , and ordered them back on. He lay awake, going around and around in circles. He hadn’t arrived at any course of action that seemed plausible. Brendol wouldn’t be home for the whole week, which was an immense relief, but then he would arrive and Hux would have to putter around this house with him for the second week of break. Hux could go back to the dorms, but he’d have to think of an excuse. Brendol didn’t like him away from home. He’d been happy when Hux announced he was spending this break entirely at home. It was wise to keep Brendol happy. He had a week to make a decision, and sleep would help. It would reset his mind and he’d be able to think more clearly. Every time Hux started to drift away he’d jerk back to full alertness thinking of one of the pictures in the articles he’d read. He wondered if he’d ever sleep again.

At half past 1:00 he found himself remembering the quirks of his own early childhood, before his mother left. No, before she died. She’d been both mother and maid, and if she caught him smudging up the mirrors and windows she’d swat him away with an indulgent grin. “That leaves a smudge and I have to clean it. Why so interested in yourself anyway?” she’d tease, and then she’d fake overblown sorrow with a hand thrown over her forehead, “Neither of us will ever be hung for our beauty, Armitage.” She’d never been so wrong, Hux thought morosely. He hadn’t been interested in himself anyway. He made a habit of standing close to the mirror in the hall with his hands cupped to the side of his face and his nose touching the glass, holding his breath so as not to fog the image. He did the same with the windows at night, sometimes sneaking out of bed to do it. He’d been four or five, he thought. Too young to properly explain to his Mum that he wasn’t looking at himself at all, he was looking at the other boy, and more importantly, the other house behind him. Reflections were windows into another world, and what he saw in them wasn’t their living room or bathroom, it was the other family’s. The Bruckses instead of the Huxes maybe, because they were similar. But not the same. Oh, no. If you looked long enough you could pick out the differences. The rug that was oval in their living room was circular in the hall mirror, the door to the office seemed to have a turn-latch instead of a knob, the manual light switch was on the wrong side of the door. The other Hux wasn’t the same, either. They were related of course, brothers-of-the-mirror, but this other little boy was not him. He was Darker. Hux didn’t know whether the differences or the similarities were more distressing, but the fact of it was that this other boy was somehow sinister.

Drowsing now in miserable stupor on his bed, Hux supposed that if he had been able to make his mother understand what he was doing all those years ago locking eyes with the Darker Hux, and if she had told his father about it, he’d have been placed in the care of a First Order child psychiatrist. But he hadn’t been interested in the other boy, primarily. What interested him was the idea that if there was another living room beyond the glass and another hall too, then there was another front door and another world behind it. If you could get through the glass and walk through the Darker House and out the door, that different world would be waiting. Hux felt suddenly that he’d made it through the mirror after all without knowing, and that there was no Darker Hux but there was a Darker Father, who had been living there all these years and doing things that would turn the stomach of even the fiercest General.

Hux finally slipped beneath the surface of sleep and into the cold depths of it, sinking like a stone. He did not wake when his father pulled his speeder into the drive. He might have, if Brendol hadn’t lowered the headlights precisely to avoid waking his son. For he knew Armitage was asleep at this hour, although his bedroom light still glowed through the window, the yellow glow of it softened and diffused in the pouring rain. Armitage didn’t stay up late in his own room. If he were up, he’d be in the living room. Brendol knew that like he knew it would rain tonight and tomorrow and the day after.

  
  


A cat was pawing at his face, and that wasn’t right because he didn’t have a cat, though he wanted one. Velvet touch stroked his cheek, softly but insistently. Hux tried to brush it away, but barely succeeded in raising his hand under the weight of sleep. It was a dream, anyway. There was no cat. _But if there are enough cat hairs…._ He groaned. The cat was stroking his forehead now, pushing his grimy hair up and off of his skin, and it must not be a cat, because cats didn’t speak.

“Wake up, honey. Tash, wake up. We need to talk.”

The voice was mellow. It could be soothing if you didn’t know it, but Hux did. Brendol’s voice. Brendol’s thick fingers nestled in his hair, Brendol’s palm warm and dry on his forehead. But it couldn’t be Brendol, because Brendol was off-planet--

Hux’s eyes flew open and his father was there alright, in his uniform and his gray Imperial coat with the black lapels. Not rated for rain, but spotted with it anyway. He hadn’t bothered with an umbrella on his brief trek from the garage to the house, and he’d been in the garage because he always pulled the speeder in when he was done with it. He never left it out in the weather. Brendol sat on the edge of Hux’s bed, stroking his face and hair as he only did when Hux was under the weather. His collar was undone. He was prone to unbuttoning it when the day was done now; he was heavier than he’d once been and hadn’t commissioned a new uniform yet, perhaps out of hope to regain his old shape. Hux grasped for his datapad to check the time and found he’d knocked it to the floor. He must have tossed and turned.

Brendol held up his wrist-comm theatrically and said, “Oh-four-hundred and one quarter.” He kept stroking Hux’s hair, his cheek, cupping his jaw and moving his hand around to caress the nape of his neck, turning his face to look directly at it. Like an appraisal.

Hux found his voice at last. “Father, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be--” _in orbit_.

Brendol interrupted him. He’d been smiling before, when he checked the time, and he was still smiling now. “You know, I sat in my room for two whole hours after our call, honey. Trying to convince myself that what I was thinking couldn’t be true. But I didn’t get to where I am by dodging the truth. Did I?”

Hux swallowed. “No.” He almost added a ‘sir’ on reflex, but didn’t.

“Right,” said Brendol. “So I ordered a shuttle -- not cheap, a private flight mid night-shift -- and came back down and sped on home. No traffic whatsoever out of Scarparus, I ought to take the speeder out at night more often. Maybe I will. That’s up to you now, isn’t it?”

His hand stroking Hux’s skin. It was complacently possessive, and Hux had always known that, but now he couldn’t ignore it. _You’re a skinny little bitch,_ that touch said, _but you’re my skinny little bitch, and sometimes you do surprise me. Aced your exams last year, didn’t you? And look at you now, figuring out things you should have stayed well away from._

He pushed his father’s hand away and sat up, going on the offensive. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You come sneaking in and wake me up--”

“Yes,” said Brendol, his cold blue-gray eyes flicking around the lighted room. There was no guilt in his demeanor. “You never sleep with your light on. And you never sleep with your robe on either. Forgot to take it off, didn’t you? You poor boy.” Hux looked down himself and noticed that his robe was untied and splayed open, something he hadn’t done. Brendol reached out again and rested his hand solidly on Hux’s chest, right over his heart. Feeling his pulse. Brendol circled his thumb out in a caress that pebbled up Hux’s left nipple beneath the thin fabric of his shirt, and then mercifully took his hand away. “You’ve been upset, and I’m the cause. I’m sorry, Tash,” he said.

“I ate something that disagreed with me,” Hux said. It was the only thing he could think of. He’d certainly puked enough for it.

Brendol looked at him with patient condescension. “You went into my office.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s sloppy work, for you. You couldn’t have made it more obvious if you tried, honey. The strip of tape on the baseboard was broken. I bet you didn’t see that, and I can’t blame you. It’s the kind that’s almost invisible once it’s on. But the box was two inches to the left of where I always put it. Not to mention the contents! What a mess.” His hand closed around Hux’s neck again and dragged him closer, his fingers a clawing vice-grip now. “I’ve always loved that box, you know, because you gave it to me. So thoughtful.” Brendol pulled him up roughly by the neck and planted a quick kiss between his brows. Hux couldn’t stop the shudder that wound it’s way down his spine. It occurred to him that he might be dead before dawn, another secret footnote in the life of Brendol Hux, his own ambitions unrealized.

“Father,” he gasped, “I swear to you I won’t breathe a word of any of it.”

Brendol chuckled as though Hux had gotten off a particularly witty line. “You didn’t search up your mother. You went through the rest of them, the rest that made the news anyway. Aren’t you curious?”

Hux felt the first thin stirrings of anger cutting through his fear, ridiculous given his current predicament, but there they were. “ _You--!_ ” He cut himself off, too angry to continue.

“Of _course_ I keep tabs on your datapad. Honestly, Tash, what do you think of me? It’s simple enough to mirror a device anyway. You spent a while on that gardener’s page. Did that do it for you?”

Hux squirmed, trying to break out of his father’s grasp. Brendol held him tight, and began to speak. He seemed relieved to do so, as though he’d been holding years of confessions tight and it was a sort of rush to finally let go. Like holding your bowels in until you make it to the next passing period, which, no matter how good it felt to the sufferer, was not an event anyone else wanted part of. Hux’s breath was coming in panicked bursts and he was growing lightheaded, but was unable to even out his own respiration. He didn’t want to know this, didn’t want to know any of it, foremost because anyone who knew all of this could not be left alive.

Brendol waxed poetic about his first kill, which in fact had occurred long before the first two in the Arkanan papers and far away from here. It was during his service in the Clone Wars -- he got the idea to walk a fellow officer away from the group at night and then turn his blaster on her. “I was scarcely out of my teens, hormones so high I got stiff when the wind blew just right. You know, don’t you? You’re there. I’d come onto her before then and she was a fucking priss, shot me right down. I traded another guy his watch schedule so she’d be stuck with me. I waited until we were on the furthest part of the watch route from the tents and then I knocked her down, tossed her gun away. Out of reach. I told her if she’d, you know, fuck me real good I’d let her go. If she didn’t I’d have to kill her. She fucked to live, she did that alright.” Brendol nodded slowly. His eyes were hazy with grotesque nostalgia, the glory of old. “I wasn’t sure she actually would. You know how all young soldiers are. You know it better than me, now. They walk around like unexploded bombs.”

 _You’re not unexploded,_ thought Hux, _not anymore. Not for a long time. And the radiation’s killer, isn’t it? Can’t get it out of the soil._

“She was a fucking snot, that girl, so you can’t blame me, honey.”

“You didn’t get caught?” Hux asked weakly, unsure why he did it except that if Brendol was talking and wanted Hux to listen, he couldn’t strangle the life out of him at the same time.

Brendol’s eyes lit up. “Shot her point blank and dressed her again. Left her in the brush and shot myself in the arm, came back to camp yelling about enemy droids. No one questioned it. The angle was all wrong on my wound, but no one even looked at it.” The amazing thing was how normal he made it sound, as if every man would do the same given the chance. He probably thought they would. “What do you think about that?”

“I think...you got lucky,” said Hux.

Brendol laughed good-naturedly. “You bet! If I was a religious man I’d say the Force was looking out for me that day. All it would’ve taken was one motherfucker questioning my story and it would’ve fallen apart. But it held, and here I am.”

“The Force’s plan for you is to torture and kill people?” Hux asked drily. He couldn’t help himself.

Brendol scoffed. “It’s all a load of shit anyway. Our Generals were Jedi back then, real Jedi -- or at least they seemed to be. And they didn’t suspect anything either. Besides, they were all _snots_. They all had it coming.” His victims, he meant, and that anger was rising in Hux again.

“Mum?” He asked. “What about her?”

“Get a bit older and you’ll understand,” Brendol told him gravely. “Go on and get a woman in a family way. It ruins them, makes them talk back. It was okay, though. I didn’t need her anymore.”

 _Because you had me_. Hux didn’t say that out loud, didn’t want to. Didn’t even want to think it, but his brain betrayed him. Brendol seemed to read it in his eyes anyway, and Brendol was probably pretty good at reading pale green eyes by now.

“I know you adored her. She only showed you the best, after all. But like it or not, and I know you don’t like it right now, _you’re my boy too_ . You have to know I fought it. I stopped, honey, for almost twenty years. _For you_.”

 _Sixteen_ , thought Hux, _sixteen and you know it, and I know it, and you know I know it_ . He also doubted that he had factored into Brendol’s decision to stop, if it had even been a decision. Perhaps it was only circumstance. He wanted a glass of water, but Brendol’s left hand was still on the back of his neck, holding him close, and his right hand had come up to Hux’s chest again, clasped over his heart, using it as a gauge for his thoughts. _As long as he doesn’t touch my nipple again, anything but that. Okay, not anything_. If Hux tried to get up to get a drink, he thought Brendol would stop him, and then what? Would they struggle?

“You think I’m a monster,” Brendol accused, and his eyes were actually shiny, and for a moment Hux felt sorry for him, before he realized how sick that was. “I’m not a monster. I do good work. I built the trooper program back up from the ground. I established the cadet curriculum. The Empire lives on because of _me_.”

 _It would be better_ , Hux thought, _if the Order was less like the Empire_. A thought he harbored often and not one he would voice in front of his father even on a good day. Certainly not now.

“I’m a good soldier. I always have been,” Brendol insisted. “Look at the proof.” He spread his fingers on Hux’s chest and this time his pinky did rasp over Hux’s left nipple again, making him wince. “Look at my son. Top of his fucking class, even with a feral slut for a mother. You know she used to work at a caf station in the port before I brought her here? Her skirt was too short. Patched, too. She couldn’t afford a new one, but that makes no difference. She knew what she was doing, standing by the bar with those long pale legs out on display. And she’d ask me if I wanted a warm up, leaning over my shoulder to pour it and fluttering those pretty eyes. Trying to get me hard. She did, I admit it. I was engaged then, but a man has needs and that bitch was _all over me_. My fiancée was another priss. Broke things off when my maid’s belly started showing. I’ve always been highly sexed and some people sense it. They like to play with it. It gets them off to tease and run, thinking they can play with fire and not get burnt up to charcoal. But you know that. You know it. You’re the same. I bet they play with you, young thing that you are. Do you put out?” Brendol’s hand twitched again, two fingertips circling around Hux’s nipple, the sensitive little bud -- underdeveloped, he thought, his chest looked underdeveloped and flat, Brendol had always criticized him for it -- stiffening under the stimulation, and there was no way it was an accident. He gagged, and Brendol laughed.

“Father, please….” Hux choked out.

Brendol’s grip on the back of his neck tightened, becoming painful. “Are you still my little boy? Or do you fuck around in that dorm? No, the library. You were so upset about those books. I remember. Did you want that wuss with the glasses so bad? Don’t bother. That man was a snot, too. I can tell them a mile away. He was only teasing you.” Brendol’s temper was finally rising, his sinister good humor collapsing. “You’ve been fucking around in that dorm, haven’t you? Fucking around with those boys, letting them put their filthy hands on you. _In you_. I need to check.”

Hux’s mind spun in horror so potent it made the whole room look fake, like it was all a hologram. _Check?_ Brendol pressed him down onto the sheets again, brusquely rolling him over, and then his robe was pulled aside and his trousers were being edged down, exposing a strip of the flesh on his back to the chill of the room. In a panic, Hux kicked him. Brendol fell from the bed and landed in a heap on the floor. Hux scrambled away to the far side of the bed, knotting his robe closed again and drawing the neckline closed with his hands, as if that would help. As if it were armor.

“You think I’m crazy,” Brendol hissed from the floor. His hair was disheveled. It was fading, more of a dusty orange now than red. His eyes were rainwater gray. “I can see it in your eyes. I’ve seen that look before. But _I’m not crazy_ . _They’re crazy_. They don’t see the truth right in front of their eyes, that those little sluts are asking for it.” His voice changed, swelling with pride. Bragging. “You know I’ve only been questioned once? The General questioned me, after they found the boy, and then he let some Arkanan lout in who’d been bugging him about the other bodies. He let them butt into Order business. It was an old man with a bad hip and that hideous burr some of them have, flashed his ID at me and asked his questions. But he was dumb, took my answers and said to give him a call if I thought of anything else. That was rich. I said I would. It was about the cadet, you know. Grayson? He was a mistake, I know that. I just couldn’t resist it. It’s what you do to me, Tash.” He raised his hands, palms out as if in surrender. “So it’s all with you, now.” He was reaching forward, inching forward on his knees toward the bed.

Hux’s blaster was hanging by the door on his belt. He didn’t have a weapon. He silently promised himself that if he got out of this he’d never be unarmed again. He’d strap a knife beneath his clothes. He’d sleep with it. “ _Stay back_ ,” he yelled. “ _Don’t you touch me_.”

Brendol paused, heeding the warning at least for now, though he chuckled soundlessly like he sometimes did while watching a propaganda vid, and he was smiling. “Honey,” he said patronizingly. “You know that old punchline, I know you’re thinking of it… ‘tell you and I’d have to kill you’... it doesn’t apply here. I could never kill you. Everything I’ve built here is for you, for your future.”

 _Lie_ , Hux thought. Everything Brendol did was for Brendol, and to a lesser degree for the Brendol Junior he’d imagined, the one who excelled at the Academy and was strong and tall and trueborn. Hux met two of those expectations. BJ met the other two, but BJ was more or less out of reach. Maratelle was smart enough to guard her children. _And alive enough_ , Hux’s brain added.

“You saw my zines, too, didn’t you?” Brendol said. “I try so hard, honey. But once you’ve had the real thing you can’t substitute fantasy for reality. I did stop, for almost twenty years!”

 _Sixteen, you liar_. He talked about it like a man who had fallen in love with some expensive and slightly unsavory delicacy, like those little birds they drowned in liquor before cooking on Ryloth and ate whole, the bones cracking under your teeth and stabbing your mouth. The blood was part of the overall flavor.

“I stopped, Tash,” Brendol was saying, “and I can stop again, if you’ll just turn the page. Say you will.”

 _He doesn’t want to kill me_ , Hux realized. _He’s not lying about that. He’s not afraid of getting caught. He doesn’t think he’ll be punished, not really, he just doesn’t want me to leave. That’s what he’s afraid of. Not because he loves me, I never measured up. Maybe just because then it would be over. He thinks it would be over and doesn’t want it to end. But it wouldn’t. He killed before me and he’ll do it again after, if he outlives me_ . Then, quiet and resolved, _He will not outlive me. He won’t_. Hux thought of a woman pulled from a well, her hair black and stringy over her face like Shay’s had been, and stars above had Shay really been an accident? She’d been clothed. Hux prayed there were no wounds beneath her dress that day. He thought of a man rotting in his own cellar, his naked thighs bruised and bitten, the wounds going black under the sightless eyes up on the shelf. Hux thought of a cadet suffering just beyond the lights of the school he’d pledged his life to that morning, brambles cutting into his stomach as a stranger in a uniform he trusted rutted into him from behind. Had Riley known he was going to die? Or had he hoped the rape would be it, that he’d get to limp back into his bunk and shiver as sleep evaded him?

“I have to think about it,” Hux said carefully.

Brendol leapt up and approached, grabbing Hux by his arms and pulling him up into a hug. Hux had to force himself not to flinch. “You’ve thought about what it would do to the Order if you turned me in,” Brendol rumbled into the shell of his ear, his breath hot. “You wouldn’t be my son if you hadn’t. Have you thought about what it would do to you? No one would believe that you knew nothing. No one wants to think it’s that easy to miss something like this. I stopped before, for you, for almost your whole life--”

 _You didn’t and you know it_.

“--and I can stop again, if that’s what you want, and even if in another twenty years--”

 _Sixteen_.

“--the urge gets too strong, I’ll be old and gray. Older and grayer. Hard to go hunting when you’re wobbling around on a cane.” Brendol laughed merrily at that image. He was right; his favorite cane was becoming more than a weapon as the years wore on. His right knee was bothering him. “I’ll tell you what,” Brendol said, sounding excited as though he’d just lighted on the best idea. “If I ever do backslide, I’ll kill myself.” Hux almost laughed because he’d come up with the same solution, like father like son, and he swallowed down the hysterical bubble of laughter before it could escape. “No one would know but you. I’d make it look like an accident. But _you’d know, and you’d know why_. It’d be our last little secret. So what do you say, honey? Deal?” Brendol leaned back to study his face.

Hux appeared to consider it. He _was_ considering, though Brendol’s ‘deal’ didn’t merit a single thought. _He sounds like a spice addict. ‘I’ll never do it again, I’ve quit before and this time it's for good, and if not then I’m gone and you’ll never have to hear from me again. I mean it.’ But he doesn’t mean it. Even if he thinks he does, he doesn’t_ . What Hux did consider was: _What am I going to do?_ He couldn’t fool his father. He hadn’t managed it even over an audio comm.

A cold voice inside the depths of Hux’s mind replied to that, one he hadn’t suspected he held inside him. Perhaps it was the voice of Darker Hux in the mirror. _Why can’t you?_ It whispered. _After all, he fooled you. You didn’t suspect a thing. Like father, like son._

“You promise to stop,” Hux said slowly. “Really promise?”

Brendol’s face sagged with relief so total and so joyous that it made him look younger. “I do, Tash,” he said. “I do promise, I already told you. So you’ll finish out the year here.”

 _Yes, that’s what he wanted alright_. “And you’ll never speak of this to me again, Father.” Disappointment clouded Brendol’s joy, and that too was strangely young of him. He had gotten a taste for sharing his morbid accomplishments with someone just in the course of an early-morning chat. But he had to be punished a little bit. That way he would believe he had convinced Hux.

“Okay. No more,” Brendol said, licking his lips. “And then, are we…?”

Hux didn’t know what his father was asking. He didn’t want to know, and he’d learned his lesson about that. He’d learned it real well. “Yes, Father.” He said.

“Thank you,” Brendol said.

“I don’t know what you’re thanking me for. I’m going to bed.” Hux shook off his father’s hands, forcing himself to turn his back on the man and climb into bed. His heart thudded in his chest, and he was suddenly dismally sure that this was it and Brendol would pounce, but his father only paused a moment and then turned and walked out toward his own room, gruffly ordering the lights off. He left Hux’s door open, the same way he always left his own open. It yawned in the darkness like a black hole, sucking the heat out of the room.

In those precious hours of darkness before the sun rose and woke Hux, though he was exhausted and had deep shadows under his eyes, he dreamed. He dreamed that he went into the kitchen to make a kettle of tea and that there was a woman tied down on the island counter. The woman was naked except for a black hood over her head, and she was bound with glowing red cords that bit cruelly into her flesh. A bondage bitch transplanted from the innocuous fake world of a fetish zine onto the cold durasteel counter of his kitchen, where the terrors, like the knife block in the corner, were real.

“Armie? Is that you?” Petra whimpered from beneath the hood. Hux tried to scream, but sometimes in nightmares, you can’t.

  
  


When Hux woke, greeted by the ever-present gray drizzle outside, he was headachey and miserable. He felt hungover. He finally retrieved his datapad from the floor and checked the time. 10:30, later than he ever slept in. Well, these were extenuating circumstances. He padded into the refresher with clothes tucked under his arm, and used the toilet, checking the lock on the door twice before he did, and then showered. It felt good to wash away the film of dried sweat on his skin. The hot water revived him some. He hadn’t brushed his teeth last night after vomiting either, and he corrected that situation now. He spat and put his toothbrush back in the holder next to his father’s, and then looked at his reflection.

His dark circles were rather magnificent. No shock there, his sleep had been brief and populated by horrors. His skin was wane, paler than normal. He pinched his cheeks hard one at a time to try and bring some color back to them, and then brushed his hair back to dry, and paused to study himself again. Darker Hux in all his glory. He knew now that the world he had believed in as a child was in fact the one he inhabited. It had been here all along, waiting for him. Not behind the glass but behind the wall.

When Hux wandered out into the kitchen his father was there, leaning on the counter by the caf maker and reading the screen of his datapad. He was squinting at it. He needed reading glasses and refused to get a pair. Vanity, maybe. Hux wondered if he would need reading glasses when he was older. Whether his mother had, or whether her green eyes had shriveled up and rotted in her skull before she’d ever had to consider it.

“Morning, honey,” said Brendol.

Hux poured himself a cup of caf. Brendol always made it too weak, and it looked the color of strong tea. Not the jolt he needed to make conversation today. He drank anyway, gulping down one scalding cup and going back for another. On any other day, ignoring a greeting would make Brendol cross. Today he seemed abashed, as if he were the child and Hux the father. A role reversal that Hux didn’t like, although it could be useful.

“About last night--” Brendol started again.

“Nothing happened last night,” Hux snapped at him. “You came home early. That’s it.”

Brendol smiled, and it seemed grateful. Hux almost wished he would begin yelling instead. “That’s fine, then,” Brendol said. “Case closed?”

“Closed book,” Hux said, and then his mouth twitched. He didn’t want to think of books.

Brendol pointed to his own cheek. “Give us a kiss, honey.” He hadn’t asked for that since Hux was seven or eight. Maratelle didn’t like it. She said Hux was too old for it. Hux thought, now, that that had not been her true objection. He stepped in and gave his father a peck on the cheek and then retreated, going to the opposite end of the counter to lean and drink his caf. He wondered if Brendol had made _them_ kiss him. Certainly not on his scratchy bearded cheek. Hux could imagine his father saying, _Do a good job, really use that educated tongue of yours, and I won’t hit you again. Put your snotty little heart into it._ And it would be a lie. The blows would still rain down, in the end.

Hux’s head burned, and he decided to try his luck. “I don’t feel like cooking. Go and get us a couple of sandwiches from Grubby’s?” Normally Brendol would call him lazy, even if old Brendol did like a sandwich from Grubby’s, more than Hux did. Today, however, Brendol just beamed and hopped to it, grabbing his speeder’s keys off the hook on the wall on his way out to the garage. Hux thought, watching Brendol’s paunchy frame retreat, that his father really should cut back on the sodium. It was bad for his heart. But no, let Brendol test his heart. Let him test it all he wanted.

  
  


The next gray day came and went, and the next and the next, and Hux went back to school. Months passed. They resumed their lives, with perhaps more gentle compromise between them than they’d ever had before. Hux returned to the rifle club, and joked with the other cadets the same as he always had. If Mitaka or Thanisson noticed anything off about him, they didn’t dare bring it up. Brendol walked the halls of the Academy during the day. Hux suspected he still did it at night, too, looking into rooms where people slept, unheeding of the monster at their door. Sometimes Hux lay awake listening for his father’s distinctive boot-tread, a short of step-shuffle as he favored his bad knee. Once he thought he heard it, though it didn’t come down the hall where Hux’s bunk was. A man can only change so much.

Winter Fete came, along with it another two-week break from school, and Hux did not bother to invent a reason to stay at the Academy. He rode home in the passenger seat of Brendol’s speeder, and even sang along with the radio under his breath. They settled into their house -- and it was theirs in a way it hadn’t been, now that Hux had seen the unsavory pieces and stayed -- and let the icy Arkanan winter settle around them. Brendol talked to him, enfolding him neatly into the other secrets of his life since he was barred from sharing the ones he really wanted to. This was fine by Hux; he learned more about the functioning of the Order than his current status made him privy to, including the existence of a shadowy new financier. Hux noted the name -- one word, _Snoke_ , ominous and thoroughly un-Imperial -- and snooped through Brendol’s datapad while the man was in the shower to find the contact number.

Hux looked forward to the freedom of his graduation more than he ever had before, and it had always seemed a salvation to him. He’d choose a post even further away now. As far as a star destroyer could take him. Maybe he’d choose a planet. Somewhere not to Brendol’s taste. Somewhere hot and sandy. He’d burn up, but what of it? He burned alive every day now. Or a world of ice. His heart was already frozen. Hux had brought coursework home with him this break, and worked fervently. He knew Brendol saw it, and that he suspected, but neither of them addressed it. It was possible that Hux could graduate early. He had the credits, and he was a shoe-in for valedictorian anyway. If Brendol tried to prevent it, it would look odd to the other Order officials. His stranglehold on Hux’s life was slipping loose and soon Hux would be free.

 _Except that I know._ Suppose Brendol tried to keep him here under the threat of that? He could say that Hux had been involved, tear them both down to keep Hux near. Surely he wouldn’t? Hux got up in the night now, walking around the Darker House, peering at his reflection in the windows as the night-rains fell. Looking at the fixtures of that old place, the one he’d left behind in a past life. Brendol knew. Hux could tell because his father snored when he slept, and the snoring went quiet when Hux walked around at night.

Hux waited until he was done with his schoolwork, his extra course load completed with top scores, to tell Brendol that he could graduate a semester early. He did it over dinner, and once the words hung in the air, Brendol set his fork down. He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin (three times, he always did it three times) and then said, “Oh?”

“It’s actually not that I can. It’s that I have,” said Hux. “Everything’s in order.”

“You’ve chosen a placement, then?” Brendol asked, and for the first time in months a storm was brewing in his gray eyes.

“No,” said Hux. “I can, if you want me out of here. But I thought I’d take my time with it. See another spring here. It could be the last one. Is that cowardly?”

Commandant Brendol Hux should have agreed heartily that it was, and encouraged any capable cadet to head into service as soon as possible. He did not. “I think that’s a prudent idea,” he murmured, beginning to eat again. Satisfaction rolled off him in cloying waves. “We ought to celebrate. I have a bottle in the conservator.”

Hux fetched it.

  
  


Spring came on, and Hux went for walks outside. The springtime rains were more unpredictable than other seasons, sometimes a gentle misting and sometimes fierce storms. He walked either way, out to the cliffs to peer into the pools in the jagged rock where Shay had drowned, where he hoped she’d drowned. Where he’d found her. He no longer thought of killing himself, if for no other reason than his determination to see Brendol into the ground. As time wore on that desire grew and changed, encompassing not just his father but everyone in the Order who thought like he did. Hux would find them all and remove their ugliness from the galaxy, and he would never kill like his father did. Every death by Hux’s hand would serve the Order, not himself. The First Order’s war would be won not with blood but with the cleansing light of laserfire.

Hux thought often of his mother, of her fine-boned hands swatting him away from mirrors, of her eyes mirrored in his face. He thought, _She knew what she was doing, standing by the bar with those long pale legs out on display,_ and _neither of us will be hung for our beauty._ His own legs were long and pale between the hem of his cadet shorts and his socks. He’d soon trade out this uniform for another one...he counted the days in his head and realized it was just over two weeks. Long enough to arrange a funeral and to deal with whatever questions came knocking at his door. He knelt in the forest between the house and the cliffs, his own fine-boned hands on his knees, letting the rain patter down onto his raincoat, and he studied the plants there. His mother had pointed them out to him and named them all once, giving him little tidbits about where the names came from or if the plant appeared in her tribe’s folklore, or if it had medicinal properties. He found what he was looking for and plucked the thing free -- a conical-looking purple flower like a pine cone growing up on a thin stem, leaning over to the side like an old-fashioned bell on a stick for snuffing out candles. His mother had told him about those, too. Her tribe had used animal-fat candles instead of algae lamps to light their homes before the Empire brought sterile electric lights here, chasing out the gloom of the storms with warm yellow light instead of ghoulish green.

That night, he plucked the indigo petals free and mixed them in with the greens they’d be eating alongside a dinner of fish and champagne. He’d bought the bottle, a rather expensive one, and sickly-sweet just like Brendol liked best.

“What’s all this about?” Brendol asked when he wandered into the kitchen, having heard the bottle pop open.

“Two weeks,” Hux said.

Brendol looked at him, his face unreadable. “You’ve chosen.”

“Mm-hm. It’s time.” _Or would be. I’d be graduating soon if I hadn’t already. This is all the time you were ever going to get, you old fool_.

“Care to enlighten me, Tash?” Brendol sat, letting Hux serve him. Hux overpoured into the opaque plastisteel cup he’d set out -- Brendol wouldn't complain.

“Eat before your food gets cold,” Hux admonished him, and Brendol did after Hux started on his own fare, determined not to talk yet. Hux ate slowly, pointedly clearing his plate and drinking daintily from his own plastisteel cup, barely tipping it up. He got up to refill Brendol’s cup when it was drained, and poured himself another half-serving. His cup had only been half full to begin with. Brendol drank most of the bottle in the end, only one serving’s worth sitting untouched at Hux’s end of the table.

When they were finished and Hux was clearing the plates, Brendol asked again. “So where have you decided on, my boy? The orbiter?” They both laughed. Any cadet worth their salt wanted a posting on a star destroyer.

“No,” Hux smiled, running water over their plates. “I’ve accepted a place aboard the Finalizer. I’m to be her commander, if this new financier you mentioned likes my work. It will be the Order’s flagship.” There was, in actuality, no question that Hux would be the Finalizer’s commander. He selected his own staff too, and had already informed them, Mitaka and Thanisson among his crew. He’d already spoken with Snoke using the number he obtained from Brendol’s device, and the strange old alien, while much more invested in the Force than Hux could begin to understand or sympathize with, had liked Hux’s plans for the First Order very much.

Brendol sputtered then, deeply proud and deeply insulted to be told only now. “ _Flagship?_ And who is it you’ve been talking to? Tash, this is--” He paused, swallowing thickly, and drank more of his champagne to try and clear away his sudden discomfort.

Hux let the plate he was holding slide from his fingers and land in the sink, where it broke in two. “Father?” He asked calmly.

“Tash,” Brendol said again, the word hardly understandable, his voice gravelly. There was fear in his rainwater eyes, and Hux was not too besotted with his own ideals to admit that it felt good to see that. There was rage there too, and Hux thought that if it hadn’t worked -- that old combination of death-bell and alcohol that native Arkanans avoided almost by instinct, the knowledge so deeply ingrained in them that dangerous combinations of local herbs held no more threat to them than the shadow of a passing cloud -- if it hadn’t worked, Brendol would kill him now. Brendol thought he couldn’t, but Hux knew he could. He was trying to rise even now, hauling himself up from the table and swaying, his eyes locked on Hux’s, dark with murder.

Hux hopped up to sit on the sink ledge, dangling his long legs like a young boy sitting on a fence. When he’d first realized the awful truth of it all those months ago, with his father’s breath hot and horrible in his ear and the man’s hands cradling him like a dance partner at a sweethearts ball, holding him like shackles, he’d wondered whether it would break him. Hux was delighted to find that he’d weathered it, and that he was more adaptable than he’d given himself credit for. Brendol might as well have leaned in and whispered the full confession to him that night, both _I beat you because I want to fuck you,_ and also _I killed them all because I want to kill you_. Hux had known it as surely as if he’d said the words out loud. And he adapted. He couldn’t spend his whole life looking in mirrors, after all. Hux batted his eyelashes sweetly, once, twice. He was unable to keep the smile off his face, and he was sure it wasn’t sweet.

Understanding flashed between father and son, understanding that was yellow and ancient and bitter. Hux’s understanding of Brendol was complete. Brendol loved nothing but himself, and least of all Hux. Hatred was too weak a word for it. Every slap and skin-splitting whack with a cane, and every slur he’d ever used on Hux was only the surface of a reflecting pool. The murky and cluttered horrors beneath the water showed up in the murders, and even those were only test runs for the main event. A good commander is thorough. Every caress and every scarce kindness Brendol had ever paid him, too, was camouflage. Self-serving, because Brendol still wanted to be the hero. A good father for a good son. A good soldier. Brendol was a shell and the only thing inside was malintent. His nature was malignancy. Teeth biting into flesh, sometimes to the bone, the very savage ferality he’d accused Hux’s mother of. Unrefined and impulsive, sentimental not for others but for himself. A more perfect temptation for Brendol Hux could not have been made in a lab; Armitage Hux was half his mother’s willowy Arkanan beauty and half Brendol himself, the only thing that held any importance to the commandant. That was Brendol’s downfall. And Hux knew that Brendol was understanding him now too for the first time. He was late to this game, but he was catching up quickly.

Hux was a shell too, and there was nothing inside but howling emptiness.

Brendol gurgled and lunged, knocking the table aside and wrapping his thick red hands around Hux’s throat. Hux could have laughed, the grip was so weak. He did laugh before he pulled Brendol’s hands away. His breath held the tang of sweet liquor and Hux knew that if it had held any appeal for him before it wouldn’t now. Brendol went to his knees, the bad one popping painfully on the durasteel floor. He was still grasping for a hold on Hux, his hands trying uselessly for Hux’s thighs, his calves. Hux put a foot in the center of Brendol’s chest and kicked him unceremoniously to the side.

“Why?” Brendol rasped from the floor. Pink foam was gathering at his lips, running down into the corner of his mouth and becoming pinker there, verging on red.

Hux didn’t dignify him with a response. They both knew why. He stepped over him to collect his cup from the table, pouring the champagne down the sink and rinsing it out before filling it a quarter of the way with blue milk from the conservator and placing it carefully just where it had been. He needed to be quick about the call once Brendol was gone. It wouldn’t do to wait. Hux began to cry, working himself up by thinking of Riley’s final moments. Perhaps Brendol had grunted Hux’s name and Riley had known, and had taken that knowledge to his grave. Hux needed to cry, not just because it would look better for him but because he needed to grieve. Not Brendol. Mum, maybe. Riley. Himself.

Brendol began to scream, though he’d thought to do it too late. The screams weren’t really screams at all. His mouth was filled with blood now, red blood, not pink foam like a topping at a milkshake bar. It pooled out onto the floor and spattered further when he coughed. Dark red circles like a solar system. His rage-filled stare met Hux and Hux knew he would never forget it, but that he could live with it. Hux slid down the counter to sit on the floor beside his father, outside of the worst of the mess. He leaned forward and let Brendol reach for him with bloody hands, leaving grasping stains on his shirt. Some blood was good; he’d tried to help his father after all, it was only natural. But he didn’t want to bathe in the stuff.

Brendol gurgled again, the word unintelligible if it had been one. Maybe _Tash_ again, or maybe _bitch_ . You stupid fucking bitch, Hux thought in Brendol’s voice, I should have walked _you_ out of the dorms and fucked you dead under the full dark when I had the chance, and told you if you did it real good I’d let you go, and you’d believe me because there’s nothing else to cling to.

“Shut up,” Hux said neutrally, unsure whether he was talking to the choking man beside him who still clutched at his shirt, or the one inside his head who would live on. A father-ghost whispering Hux’s own worst inventions back to him. When Brendol went five minutes without moving, Hux pressed his fingers into his father’s neck and felt for a pulse. He counted to himself. There was nothing at thirty seconds. Then, to be sure, Hux leaned his head down to Brendol’s chest. His joints felt rubbery, and he worried that this was the moment in which Brendol would come back somehow at his full strength and grab him, and that there would be hell to pay for this trick. Dying before he met his goals would be bad enough, suffering first was worse. But Brendol did not come back to life. There was no life in him. It was over.

Hux sat up, satisfied. Oh, but there was a fucking mess, wasn’t there? And it was time to clean it up. They had to know that Hux had called as soon as he could. If he left it too long, if Brendol’s blood coagulated too much, there would be pesky questions. He’d say he’d fainted if he had to. Brendol was fond of saying that _sometimes young slim people faint_ , a means of shaming him as if he could be shamed into changing the way he was built. Hux had fainted before, but only of sleep deprivation and skipping meals to study. If he claimed he had now, they might doubt it, but no one could disprove it.

Hux stood up and fetched his comms unit, realized he had stopped crying, and rested the device and his hands on the counter. He thought of Petra, who had always been nice, floating blue-skinned and cold in a ravine with her hair tangled in the weeds. It wasn’t enough, and he considered his mother instead. She hadn’t been found, and there was deep space beyond the box in the wall, and Brendol always kept his office windows open to the rain. It didn’t take much to convince himself that he had smelled something vile from the office when he passed by the door the year she died. That did the trick, and he was weeping.

He called the Order’s emergency line.

  
  


Brendol Hux was laid to rest on the Academy grounds on an unseasonably warm day, almost like summer, less than a hundred yards from where he’d choked the life out of Riley Drayson. Everyone turned out. The yard was a sea of black and gray coats clustered together like strange birds. Hux’s eyes brimmed over when he saw Roisin’s face in the crowd, and he wiped them clean with the back of his glove. He’d switched over his uniform, no longer bare-legged, and traded his raincoat for a wool greatcoat that would serve him better in the chill of space. His father’s friends were taking rudely long looks at the bands on his wrists -- he knew they disagreed with such an immediate promotion for a graduate. But their opinions no longer mattered. Snoke had requested it, and so Hux would be giving them their orders soon. Of course, his power was split between himself and a co-commander he had yet to meet. Some kind of Sith like Lord Vader had been, supposedly. That rankled him slightly, but like the look on his father’s dying face, he could live with it. Working with one man was a hell of a lot better than answering to many. Snoke had at least seemed attuned to the vision Hux held for the future, and with any luck the other fellow the alien had selected would be pleasant. Either way, Hux could adapt.

The ceremony was ending. Hux hadn’t heard a word of it, though he was certain Enric Pryde had waxed poetic about the man in the box. Hux declined to speak, himself. He thought only, _Good riddance_ , and then bent and picked up a handful of loose black earth and let it fall atop the coffin.

Pryde invoked a moment of respectful silence, and the company bowed their heads. Not Hux. He knew he should, that he’d be raising questions otherwise, but his gaze was focused sharply on the bushes in the distance. The wind raked through them. At least it would not turn up another limp student today like a hideous treasure. _Don’t get carried away_ , Hux chided himself. _You’re no vigilante_ . In the distance, TIEs started up their drills, droning like insects. The war waited for no one, especially someone beginning to go green and bloated with rot. The sun came out from the clouds for only an instant, playing warm upon Hux’s face for the third or fourth time in his life, and Hux thought, _If there is any such thing as a higher power like the Force, let this be the end_.

It was not.

  
  


The day that Hux was set to leave, as he backed the speeder out of the garage already loaded with his trunk of worldly possessions, a stranger waited patiently in the drive. He was an elderly gentleman, a native Arkanan with piercing eyes, wearing a red coat and walking with a cane. His face was deeply lined with pain as well as age.

“Yes?” Hux snipped at him, eager to have this done with. He pulled the collar up his greatcoat up as if that would ward the man off faster.

The man drew one hand from his pockets and held out his Arkanan ID. There was a star printed on it under his photograph. “Chemin,” he said almost apologetically. His voice was melodic, his accent thick. Hux’s mother had possessed a bit of it, but if her voice was honey this man’s was gummy porridge. “Arkanis police. I’m sorry as hell to disturb you, Mr. Hux, but may I have a word?”

“It’s General,” Hux said, but then acquiesced. “Why don’t you come in?” He flipped the speeder’s ignition off and hopped out nimbly, taking long strides toward the man and offering his arm.

“Thank you kindly,” Chemin said, hobbling next to Hux through the side door and into the kitchen.

“Caf?” Hux asked him, hearing Brendol’s voice inside his head. _You know I’ve only been questioned once? Some Arkanan lout...an old man with a bad hip and that hideous burr some of them have, flashed his ID at me and asked his questions. But he was dumb, took my answers and said to give him a call if I thought of anything else_ . And now here that old man was, standing with his hands folded politely over the top of his walking stick right where Brendol had died. Right where Hux had killed him. Chemin looked both sick and in pain, and Hux thought the end of this man’s days was fast approaching. But his eyes were sharp. Hux did not think he was dumb. _Be careful. Be oh so careful of this one, Hux_.

The caf maker whirred to life. Hux had it on the strongest setting. It brewed quickly -- Hux wondered how the machines on the star destroyers matched up. Were they better? Hux poured two mugs and then took a seat at the table. Where he’d sat that night. Chemin thanked him for the caf and took Brendol’s spot.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Cream?” Hux asked.

“No, no. Black as that coat you’re wearing is fine for me.” Chemin smiled.

“How can I help you, sir?”

“Only a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course. But I wonder, could I see your identification again?” Chemin handed it over without delay. “And does this R.E.T. mean retired?” Hux asked.

“Yes and no. Had to go officially when I turned sixty-eight, and I’m seventy-eight this month, if I make it. I always add that, for good luck. It’s worked so far. But they keep me around at the station. Kind of like a mascot,” Chemin smiled. His teeth were aged, yellow and worn.

 _No, no. You’re a lot more than that_. Hux thought, and handed back the ID wordlessly. Chemin pocketed it again, and drank from his mug. Hux followed suit, then asked again, “How can I help you today, Detective Chemin?”

Chemin laughed and the laugh turned into a cough. “It’s been years since anyone called me detective,” he said. “If you’ll go straight to Chemin, that’ll work for me just fine. But I know you military types are sort of stuffed up. It was your father I wanted to speak to today, you know, but of course he’s passed on. My condolences.” His sharp eyes flicked around the room, taking in every detail. “This is a nice kitchen. My wife would have liked to work in one like this. She’d have approved. She died very suddenly five years ago. Heart attack. I miss her every day. Just like you miss your dad, I imagine.” Chemin’s eyes sparkled mischievously, searching Hux’s. His eyes were young and alert in his tired old face.

 _He knows. I don’t know how, but he does_ , Hux thought wonderingly. “I’m sorry. You’ve missed him by a few days now,” Hux said.

“Yes, it’s entirely out of the question, talking with your dad,” Chemin said. “But an old man who lives in a rented room, as I do, gets tired of only the holovision for company. So I figured, what the hell, I’d come up this way and ask my questions anyway, so long as there was a Hux living here. Now the younger one may not be able to answer many of them, I said to myself, or any of them, but I’d go and ask just the same. And well, here I am. I don’t mean to frighten you. I’m too old to bite.”

And hadn’t Brendol insinuated something similar about his own future? Hux didn’t believe it from Brendol and he didn’t believe it now. He was afraid of this old man. Brendol would have been right to be afraid too, when this man came calling at the Academy, but Brendol had underestimated Chemin like he underestimated Hux, and anyway Brendol was beyond fear now.

“Mr. Hux,” Chemin started again, and Hux interrupted him.

“Armitage. Please.” Two could play here. No detectives, no misters.

“Armitage! What a nice name. Old-fashioned.” Chemin looked genuinely delighted.

“Thank you. Perhaps you can tell me what you wanted to discuss with my father?” Hux drank and looked at Chemin over the rim of his mug, and suddenly it was like having a father again. A good father for a good son. It was like a joke. He knew that Chemin knew, and Chemin knew that he knew that he knew. It was like seating two mirrors across from each other so that the echo goes down into infinity. The real question is what Chemin was going to do about it. Chemin’s gaze pierced into him, and it was indecent, like he was taking Hux’s clothes off. It was pleasant for the same reason. “What did you want to ask my father, Chemin?” Hux repeated.

“Well I already talked to him once,” Chemin said. “About a year ago now. You’d remember, the poor kid was your age.”

Hux gave him a chilly spare-me smile. “I remember.”

“I was assigned to the serial killing cases...they sort of grouped them together, you see...before retirement, and I continued on after. Because it stopped and started. There were sixteen years or so where nothing happened, and then it all started up again. I figure the guy that done it all must have had a lot of nasty shit built up after waiting so long, and had to get it out into the world. That’s why there were so many, so close. And why they all suffered like they did. So I went sniffing around and my leads pointed to the old Academy. That poor girl Petra, well...in town people talk, and apparently she’d been telling her friends that she didn’t like it much here in this nice kitchen. Said the boss gave her the creeps. That he flirted with her and she didn’t like it.”

“That doesn’t sound like my father,” said Hux, thinking that it very much did.

“No,” Chemin said obligingly. “But it probably was. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but since they’re both dead I figure it cancels itself out. A son doesn’t always know what his father does when he’s away from home, although he may think he does. And I went to digging and found a few people who said they saw your father’s speeder around the ravine where the body turned up around the time the murder would have occurred. The speeder out front.”

“Did my father know you have such a particular interest in him?” Hux asked, staring Chemin down.

“Oh he knew, but I think as far as he was concerned I was just a limping old man looking for witnesses. No one fears an old coot like me.”

 _I fear you plenty_. “It’s not much of a case you’ve got.”

“No case at all!” Chemin agreed. “If I had a case for any of those poor souls your father and I would have had the conversation in my office, not his. Where you don’t get to leave until I say so.”

“It’s time to stop dancing, Chemin.” Hux said, putting his mug down with a final, muted tap on the table.

“All right. I can tell you’re a smart young man, and I know you’ve places you’d rather be, so we’ll speed this up. Can you vouch for your father’s whereabouts on the day Petra disappeared?”

Hux paused, smiled, and he could feel on his face that it was not a sweet smile. Maybe he’d never smile nicely again, if he ever had. He countered, “What do you know about the Drayson murder?”

“Do you have any of your father’s files?”

“They were returned to the Academy. You can find them there.”

“Ah, but that takes a warrant to get anything loose, and to get a warrant I need probable cause, which I just don’t have. I’ve got a number of leads and a number of...hunches, I guess you’d call ‘em. So I came to you, Armitage. To be honest I thought I’d be thrown out by now, but you’ve been very kind.”

 _Am I? No, I don’t think so. I’m not that_. Hux said nothing.

Chemin leaned forward, hunching over the table like a bird of prey, and Hux knew he was done playing games. It was time. His eyes were piercing, but kind. The only kindness in the room would come from Chemin, Hux suspected.

“Armitage, was your father a killer?” Chemin asked.

Hux knew that the old man might be recording this conversation. Audio equipment could be hidden. He saw no evidence of video equipment, and so he took a chance. He silently raised his right hand, palm open toward Chemin, showing it to him.

“You didn’t know, did you? Right up until the end.”

Hux placed his palm down onto the table, and then raised it again. He tried to look at Chemin, _into_ Chemin, only he knew that that was dangerous. You weren’t always seeing what you thought you were seeing. Hux knew that now, well.

“And then you did know.”

“Would you like another cup of caf?”

“No, thank you. I’ve had a lot of pity caf in my days and none as good as yours, but I’ll get indigestion. The families deserve closure.”

“They do deserve it,” Hux admitted, then added coldly, “but do they need it?”

“Riley Drayson’s penis was bitten off while he still lived. Did you know that?”

Hux flinched. He hadn’t. He closed his eyes and felt warm tears trickle down his face through his lashes. If Brendol had appeared in front of him again in that instant, alive and well and begging for mercy, Hux would have killed him again.

“His father knows,” Chemin continued softly. “Mother knew. They had to live with that knowledge about the child they loved every day of their lives. They’re both dead now, in a way. The father never surfaces from the bottle.” He reached across the table and clasped Hux’s hand where it rested, and Hux flung him off.

“Stars,” Hux choked out, blinking rapidly to try and quell his outburst. The damage was done, though. The damage was done. “ _Fuck_ ,” he added, wiping at his face.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Chemin said mildly.

“Of course you did!” Hux spat at him. “But do you think I haven’t been? Do you think I… you, you _nosy old fuck_.”

Chemin chuckled, but it was not cold. It was not without remorse. “I don’t think so. I saw otherwise, as soon as you looked at me.” He paused, and then said deliberately and slowly. “I saw everything, Armitage.”

“What do you see now?”

Chemin got up, tapping his own mug on the table once in a final thanks, and adjusted his coat around himself to leave. “I see a young man who should be left to attend to his future.”

“And the families that deserve closure?” Hux asked. His hands were trembling, and he clenched his fists hard enough to make the leather of his gloves creak.

“Do they need it?” Chemin asked, and Hux flinched again as if struck. Then Chemin’s face softened. “Would knowing that the man who killed their loved ones, who _mutilated_ them, is dead help any of them now? I don’t know. I’m just an old fool who’s seen more than he ever wanted to. Than he ever needed to. Anyway, I’m going into full retirement next week. Going home. Doctor says I won’t spend long there.”

“I’m sorry,” Hux said woodenly, and was privately glad, and privately disgusted with himself.

Chemin held out one hand for a farewell handshake, and Hux stood and walked around the table to give it to him. When Chemin grabbed his hand Hux found himself abruptly pulled into the man’s arms. He was thin like Hux, but also sinewy like Hux, and surprisingly strong. Hux was startled, but before it morphed into fear Chemin whispered into his ear.

“You did the right thing, lad.”

And then the old man kissed his cheek, and pulled away. Hux watched Chemin walk down the drive, a slow and hobbling old man’s walk even with his cane, the same sort of cane that Hux had felt the sting of across his back so many times, and Hux hoped that he would never have to use one. That some great catastrophe would spare him that if it was what old age held for him. When Chemin was gone, Hux hopped back into his father’s speeder, the one he now knew had held Petra’s body in the back where his trunk was, and revved up the engine. The launch station in Scarparus was waiting, and after that the Finalizer.

He adjusted the rearview mirror to steal a quick glance through the glass and saw only his own reflection.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay if you went on this ride first of all I'm sorry and I even upset myself with this one. We're back to Stephen King-verse Star Wars with 'A-Good-Marriage-but-more-fucked-up.' Also it's sad hours about Hux having that First Order regulation cane in TROS. ):
> 
> TW:  
> Brendol is attracted to and wants to both rape and kill his own son. Huge ol' TW for Brendol being a fucking creep.  
> After-the-fact descriptions of murders and mutilations that previously occurred, including beating, biting, rape, rape with an object, beheading, and being tied up.  
> Verbal abuse of murder victims by the murderer.  
> Regressive views on being gay in the First Order, briefly mentioned. Hux is gay.  
> Briefly mentioned accidental death AND on-purpose death and torture of minors.  
> The raped cadet is not a minor, but that doesn't make it less gross ya know?  
> Hux is an adult (we're saying the Academy goes until you're twenty).  
> Hux is not nice! He is still a villain who kills people and rationalizes it to himself! But he thinks he's better than Brendol. Whether or not that's true is up to you.


End file.
